🏜️✨The Nexialist #0187

caju | cashew | climate fix | great green wall | bioremediation | sever the blight | trajectories for future festivals

Aug 22, 2024

welcome to your weekly batch of naturally fermented content, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you soft and crunchy. this week, we start with a sonic trip that takes us on a fruity road to some climate talk and lo-tek solutions. i don’t have much to add to this intro, so i’ll leave you to it. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🇧🇷caju

save this to savour during breakfast on sunday (or right now). liniker is one of our jewels from brazil. she is also the first trans woman to be granted an immortal seat at the brazilian academy of culture. her new album, caju, is pure bliss; i got chills, i cried, i danced. she has the sweetest voice, stunning synesthetic lyrics and such a sophisticated jazzy sound mixing with other styles like pop, pagode, samba, disco and reggae. i mean, 7 minute tracks… it’s another one of these things i wish everyone understood portuguese (even if there’s a delicious track in english, so special).

brainsparks: love to remember (tn#37), sonic healing (tn#11), fruity men (tn#182)

🥜cashew

caju is how we spell cashew in portuguese. after moving to europe i was shocked about how many people did not know cashew nuts grow on trees and are attached to a juicy, very edible fruit. growing up in brazil cashew juice is a common thing to have at home, and you can even find it fresh in caipirinhas and other cocktails (yes, it’s amazing). so i’m using this space to share with the non-brazilians a bit more about this fruit.

what i didn’t know is that cashew is from the same family as the poison ivy, and you need special equipment to take the nuts, or you burn yourself. this video shows the whole process of collecting the nuts, which explains why it’s expensive.

brainsparks: pitanga aka surinam cherry (tn#109), mangoes as a propaganda tool (tn#106)

🌎climate fear fix

found this for all the climate anxious people out there. data scientist hannah ritchie (author of ‘not the end of the world: how we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet’) brings arguments and data oh how we are developing the solutions for a sustainable future. she calls herself an urgent optimist, which i was not familiar with.

“I like to frame myself as an 'urgent optimist.' Now, this is different from a 'complacent optimist' or a 'stupid optimist,' which is someone that just assumes that the future will be better than it is today. No, it won't. It will only be better if we make it better.”

i do have my reservations, since (at least in the video) is quite tech-solutionist and there is not much about the impact of exploitation of minerals for batteries, for instance. but seeing the data brought some kind of relief. then this comment summed it up for me:

@Elleh42: I don't feel doomed be because these problems are unsolvable. I feel doomed because the people in charge refuse to solve them and people are disenfranchised and powerless to hold the people in charge accountable.

brainsparks: code red for humanity (tn#32), climate violence (tn#131), green colonialism (tn#145), ideas to postpone the end of the world (tn#19), decarbonizing earth (tn#179)

🏜️great green wall

i had this link saved for some time, and it’s the perfect time to share it as a great example of ancient technologies being used to fight climate change. the great green wall is a project to keep the sahara desert from expading by cultivating vegetation for 8000km (more of these kind of walls, please). the initiative is organized by the world food programme, and is a collective effort with villagers to make this happen, leveraging indigenous knowledge and community efforts for this greater cause.

this is nothing new. we have not invented a technology here, the half-moon technology is actually an endogenous technology to the Sahel and has been forgotten over time. we have rescued it from the past.

i also learned about syntropic farming:

syntropic farming, which is a type of conservation agriculture that has been developed in Brazil based on global indigenous knowledge. in the whole world, many indigenous populations have a similar way, traditionally, to do agriculture that is different from conventional agriculture and which mimics forest dynamics.

brainsparks: lo-tek: a new mythology of technology (tn#43), ask nature (tn#86), indigenous thinking for troubled times (tn#32)

🍄‍🟫bioremediation

this interview mentioned by

Patrick Tanguay

is another reminder how we can use nature to solve some of our problems. “Toxicologist Danielle Stevenson cleans up carbon-based pollutants and heavy metals from contaminated sites using fungi and plants. She’s also training environmental justice and tribal communities in using these methods so they can remediate toxic sites on their own.” we need more people, initiatives and incentives like this.

brainsparks: fantastic fungi (tn#31), designing an economy like an ecologist (tn#112)

🦠sever the blight

i’ve been sleeping on hemlocke springs and now i’m in love. i love the zany aesthetic and vibes from her tracks. i also had to google what blight meant, and i guess it’s perfect for this edition:

blight - /blʌɪt/ - noun
-a plant disease, typically one caused by fungi such as mildews, rusts, and smuts.
-a thing that spoils or damages something.

brainspark: the most creative time ever (tn#183)

🧠trajectories for future festivals

another link from

Sentiers

newsletter: “Lightning Rods and Serendipitous Discovery: Festivals are laboratories for new modes of social organization” by FutureEverything founder Drew Hemment. it reframed how i look at festivals, and changed its space in my mind from not only a merely fun experience, but also to a transformative tool.

This article delves into futures for festivals, exploring their potential to address societal challenges, foster resilience, and create sustainable futures through culture and creativity. It’s based on the insight that, as spaces where society reinvents itself, festivals are more than just events; they are dynamic laboratories of change, places where new forms of culture and citizenship are explored and rehearsed. Festival makers, you offer more than a stage or spotlight, you are agents of change.

i appreciate hemment’s effort to also find examples from the past. of course, it made me think of the carnaval and how they have developed in brazil to be such a huge open-air festival where we collectively expurge the bad energies.

I looked to the past to find ways to do the future. In the Feast of Fools—a popular festival across Europe from the 5th Century—social rules were turned upside down in a one-day social revolution. For the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin medieval carnivals were powerfully creative events, when alternate worlds were made real. The next day the world goes back to the way it was before. But as a critical futures practice, this inversion, this rupture, is an opening to difference, a space and moment when other futures can be experienced and made.

brainspark: collective effervecence, gregarious (tn#11), scenius (tn#31), heterotopia (tn#90), carnaval of the invisible (tn#110), worldbuilding ft. design fiction (tn#135)

see you next week, caju lovers 🫀✨

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